Archive for August, 2006

Usurped in Education

The People Acting To Re-Invent Outstanding Teaching (PATRIOT) Committee has discussed many good ideas about how to reform current education and also how to create a whole new model for it, from the start and its curriculum up. I learned from Marginal Revolution that the redoubtable Richard Vedder had started a new Higher Education blog […]

How is Margaret Thatcher Doing?

Some of us at Awkward Utopia like to keep up to date with the Iron Lady– well, okay, mostly me– but it appears that a few years after her husband’s death, still plagued with the maladies of old age, Margaret Thatcher is doing all right.
This article in the Telegraph details a recent “soiree” held for […]

Land of the Free– Estonia!

In our continuing examination of Estonia, it appears that the county continues its journey toward being a developed, enlightened society. It has been praised for the rapidity of its protection of property rights and defense of individual liberties after the fall of the Soviet Union, most notably in my personal experience, by Misesian scholar […]

Benjamin Franklin, a proto-Keynesian?

Here I take a look at Benjamin Franklin and his thoughts on the topic of economic science. It is interesting to see that Franklin’s opinions are quite proto-Keynesian; that said, this is quite understandable. Keynes in the last chapter of the General Theory does express a connection between his “novel” theory and the mercantilists of […]

Yogyakarta, Part II: Tolerance

The vast majority of Yogya’s population identify themselves as Muslim. They come in all shapes and sizes: some women wear jilbabs, some of them don’t. Some of them wear jilbabs and try to cover all parts of their body, some of them don’t– and some in fact wear high heels, and other accessories that rather […]

Yogyakarta, Part I: History

Yogyakarta is both a province and a city in Indonesia. The province is one of two provinces in Indonesia with special status (the other being Aceh for various reasons relating to locals wanting control over recently-discovered natural resource wealth). Yogyakarta is often considered the cultural and educational heart of this country, despite disparate cultures, religions, […]